the trouble is service pack 2 is getting pretty old and there have been many security fixes since its release. You could use a firewall to protect the machine while getting them but while MS turned on the firewall by default in SP2 they also watered down its security level (i'm not sure if this can be changed but by default the SP2 firewall trusts everything on the local subnet)
I know a certain network operator that had to buy a bunch of cesium clocks when they were upgrading from AMPS to TDMA. This was because the T in TDMA stands for "Time", and the timeslice needs minor monkey business when the phone is far from the tower, because of SOL propagation delay. To do TDMA with a sufficiently small slice to be useful, you need VERY accurate clocks. You do not need those clocks to be synchronised with any time that is meaningfull to humans nor to make them availible in a form that the phones can use to produce a time display.
Tn my experiance most phones have the option to get time from the network but it doesn't always work (I have two nokia 8210's on one it works on the other it doesn't and I tested them both with the same sim, must be a firmware issue).
When you tap the cradle, you are performing exactly the same operation, you just have to get the timing right. I think you also have to have the right phone. Afaict on many phones the cradle either goes through an electronic debouncing system or is simply too mechanically sloppy to dial this way.
oops it seems that thanks to dells badly designed configurer the price I gave was for an impossible config and the wireless selection change it forced me to make pushed the price up to £715. Thats enough to buy a copy of whitebox OEM xp home for the macbook and still come out ahead over the dell price (which included XP home).
Which indeed is what they are doing [java.net]. that project seems to be aimed at reducing download times to start using say a java applet not reducing the ammount of crap that has to be pulled in to ram from disk to start the JVM and load all the classes that are vital to a gui.
They had a session about the Consumer JRE at JavaOne, and they are NOT putting it in memory. They are doing a touch of the files at startup (or possibly after login) to put the files in the disk cache. Still a cheat, if everybody did it the situation would be hopeless, but still. last I checked disk cache was still memory.
having not taught calculus in GCSE means they can't use it in any A levels except A level maths because you may be doing them without doing A level maths and even if you do A level maths you don't do any calculus beyond the trivial polynomial stuff until the second year.
I still don't fully grasp why the different differntiation/integration formula work (I did A level further maths but while doing it realised that maths wasn't really my thing and went to do an electronic systems engineering degree) but I know what differentiation means and what the most important rules are. I have found that understanding electronics in terms of calculus makes so much more sense than understanding it in terms of complicated resultant formula. I got a B in A level electronics but I never really felt comfortable with inductors and capacitors until one of my university lecturers gave the underlying differntial equations (V=L(dI/dT) and I=C(dV/dT) ).
I never did physics A level but I would imagine it suffers the same problem.
P.S. if you are doing A level maths and want to make some questions easier learn about the complex exponential, it's not on the sylabus but it greatly simplifies some of the integration problems they throw at you.
that is possible but the thing is while apple doesn't want the iphone to be able to be used with anyone other than AT&T as it's home network they do want it to be able to roam. From what I have heared on/. roaming seems particularlly important in the USA where afaict people travel a lot between different companies areas.
Also I suspect this exclusive deal with AT&T is not a permanent thing and sooner or later they will want to sell unlocked iphones arround the world.
Honestly only an idiot would buy a MacBook and run Windows instead of OS X My macboot triple boots OS-X, windows and linux and mostly runs linux. It cost me just under £1K total including a copy of whitebox OEM windows XP pro and replacing the ram and hard drive to bring them up to 2GB and 200GB respectively (though I did get the macbook itself at student discount price). I don't consider that excessive for a well built laptop. If I need to test something on OS-X the option is there without having to crack anything. Apple provide all the drivers for OS-X as part of the installer and all the drivers for windows as a single CD image containing an installer that installs everything required.
it's hard to compare like for like with laptops but comparing the macbook to the dell lattidue (the inspiron line is cheap shit afaict) the prices look pretty similar to me (I just took the basic model lattidude and the basic model macbook and configured them to have as similar specs as possible and ended up with £637 for the macbook and £688 for the lattidue both ex VAT) so if you decide you don't want OS-X then all you've wasted is the cost of a windows license rather than the cost of a complete laptop. For those who plan to pirate windows (or use a corporate upgrade/downgrade license without having anything to upgrade from which is technically against the rules but happens all the time) the deal looks even better.
I love it when Europeans say, "no our phones are unlocked." Bullshit! He didn't say that, he said that contract phones were generally supplied unlocked while pay as you go ones were normally locked. That has generally been my experiance too though I have seen exceptions both ways (both phones sold as pay as you go that weren't locked and phones sold on contract that were).
My gf bought a cool Meteor Nokia phone in Ireland to get it unlocked to use on T-Mobile in the US. Bad idea... After the guy who sells phone accessories in the cart in the middle of the mall screwed up the unlock code 3x, the phone was dead. She then had to mail it to the UK to some guy who reflashes them. Vodafone-IRL phones are just as locked... I presume the phone your girlfriend bought in ireland was a pay as you go one and it's sad that she ran into a vendor who wasn't very competant but thats what you get for using shady market stalls. Out of interest how much did it cost her to post it to the UK and get it reflashed?
Unlocking is huge over here in the uk and not all the places that do it are short lived market stalls. There is a shop near me that does it which is in a very visible location and has been arround for years. They sell new and secondhand phones too. For new phones they sell contracts, pay as you go and sim free with no network lock. Secondhand phones they seem to always sell sim free and unlocked (the one I bought from them was orange branded but unlocked). While I don't know what method they use for sure I stronly suspect they have the flashing equipment at least as a backup method.
however a bigger problem is that afaict the chip in question had it's pins on the bottom so they had to connect to a track. Clipping to a tiny pin is possible with the right clips but I don't see how clipping to a track is.
unless you are multi-homed on high grade connections your internet connection is the most likely point of failure for your external email traffic anyway so moving to an internet hosted mail service isn't liable to reduce the reliability much if at all.
outsourcing e-mail archival or internal e-mail on the other hand seems like a pretty bad idea to me.
You're much better off with a unixy OS in any environment where gaming isn't important. strike out "gaming isn't" and replace it with "windows applications aren't"
Most people seem to have a windows app that they are closely tied to be it access, outlook, visual studio, photoshop, some internal buisness app or whatever.
Sure you can run some windows apps under wine tolerablly if you understand how wine maps between the unixy filesystem and windows drive letters and your particular app doesn't hit too many wine bugs but generally it is pretty painfull. The cost of windows licenses (even if you end up buying both OEM base licenses and corp upgrade/downgrade licenses) isn't that high and any required locking down can be handled by either scripting or imaging.
ahh the horrible practice of hiding your applications startup time in the systems startup time. It is practices like that which make low end machines horrible to use and contribute to the feeling of bloat in a modern desktop OS.
many government departments and even entire governments arround the world are threatening to require arhived documents to be in standard formats. MS is trying to do an end run arround theese requirements by getting standards bodies to approve a fake standard they have written. Unfortunately it seems that they are having quite some sucess in doing so thanks to thier use of various dirty tactics.
Nothing is stopping a third party from writing their own JRE from scratch. Many corporations have done this already. I am not aware of anyone that has sucessfully written a full J2SE JRE from scratch. IBMs java versions are licensed dirivitives of suns and the attempts by apache and gnu are far from complete. Some public classes in java have virtually no documentation at all (look at javax.swing.plaf.* for an example) so you would have needed to have a seperate reverse engineering and reimplementation team or risk cross contamination.
of course if you only care about one of the limited java subsets like J2ME then things are much easier.
The sun code is mostly released under a free software license (GPL with linking exception) now though, just a few holes left to be plugged and build issues to be sorted out and java will finally be FOSS after all theese years. Hopefully it will then see wide porting.
Speaking of which, I was at Best Buy the other day... just to amuse myself I asked the clerk if it was possible to get one of the computers there with XP. "No." Ok, how about with no OS at all? "No. Not possible." Even mail order? "Even mail order." out of interest did they offer it with a version that offers downgrade rights to XP pro (that is buisness or ultimate)?
I read somewhere that SC2 will be Dx10 only (and Mac)!- talk about decision time for some people - upgrade a rig because your forced to (because of MS) or buy a Mac.. guess we'll have to see which route people go... interesting though I suspect most gamers will upgrade to vista (or dual boot XP and vista) if they aren't on it already by the time a DX10 only game they want comes out.
Apples desktop range does not impress me. When buying a machine for gaming I want a machine without integrated monitor (generally I want to have more than one machine at a location but the location only has one decent monitor spot) and with proper 3D graphics (obviously nessacery for a gaming rig). Apples cheapest machine that fits this spec would cost £1500 here in the UK (full price inc VAT direct from apple, special offers from resellers and student discount may reduce this but I can't easilly get at the student discount shop right now). Worse that machine comes with a stingy 250GB hdd and only a gig of ram (and mac pro memory is FB-dimms with special extra heatsinking so it's over twice the price of normal DDR2 ram).
P.S. I have a macbook (which runs linux most of the time but also has OS-X and XP installed) which I spent just under £1000 total on (including XP pro OEM and replacement parts I bought because they were cheaper than apples upgrade options) paying student discount price and it's a pretty nice machine though not without it's quirks.
EPIC and ID (who at least for the FPS market seem to be the big engine guys) have had linux support for ages but few third party titles based on those engines bother presumablly because they consider it extra work for little gain.
what would you say makes a botnet inherently insecure? The bot can patch the exploits it used to get in and can be made to only take and relay commands if they are cryptographically signed by the bonets owner. That way taking over one machine from the botnet doesn't really get you any further towards compromising the net as a whole.
I have two relatives wanting XP and trying to drag me down the Vista hole. You could just buy machines with vista buisness and excercise your downgrade rights to use XP pro on them for the time being.
In London most cab companies add a 12.5% surcharge if you pay by credit card. IIRC the EU decided to force the credit card companies to allow surcharges. I don't belive the US has had the balls to do the same.
This is why there are system calls like getpwuid and getpwnam, to convert between UIDs and usernames independently of the underlying authentication system. I'm pretty sure those are library functions not system calls so all strace will see is the application accessing the authentication system.
Slashdot Mirror
you still can ( http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyId=049C9DBE-3B8E-4F30-8245-9E368D3CDB5A&displa ylang=en ) and most recent XP cds have SP2 slipstreamed anyway.
the trouble is service pack 2 is getting pretty old and there have been many security fixes since its release. You could use a firewall to protect the machine while getting them but while MS turned on the firewall by default in SP2 they also watered down its security level (i'm not sure if this can be changed but by default the SP2 firewall trusts everything on the local subnet)
I know a certain network operator that had to buy a bunch of cesium clocks when they were upgrading from AMPS to TDMA. This was because the T in TDMA stands for "Time", and the timeslice needs minor monkey business when the phone is far from the tower, because of SOL propagation delay. To do TDMA with a sufficiently small slice to be useful, you need VERY accurate clocks.
You do not need those clocks to be synchronised with any time that is meaningfull to humans nor to make them availible in a form that the phones can use to produce a time display.
Tn my experiance most phones have the option to get time from the network but it doesn't always work (I have two nokia 8210's on one it works on the other it doesn't and I tested them both with the same sim, must be a firmware issue).
If they really cared they would just block access to everyone except thier own customers.
/. do not constitute signficant traffic to them.
I think the servers belong to a big ISP and strongly suspect we geeks from
When you tap the cradle, you are performing exactly the same operation, you just have to get the timing right.
I think you also have to have the right phone. Afaict on many phones the cradle either goes through an electronic debouncing system or is simply too mechanically sloppy to dial this way.
oops it seems that thanks to dells badly designed configurer the price I gave was for an impossible config and the wireless selection change it forced me to make pushed the price up to £715. Thats enough to buy a copy of whitebox OEM xp home for the macbook and still come out ahead over the dell price (which included XP home).
Which indeed is what they are doing [java.net].
that project seems to be aimed at reducing download times to start using say a java applet not reducing the ammount of crap that has to be pulled in to ram from disk to start the JVM and load all the classes that are vital to a gui.
They had a session about the Consumer JRE at JavaOne, and they are NOT putting it in memory. They are doing a touch of the files at startup (or possibly after login) to put the files in the disk cache. Still a cheat, if everybody did it the situation would be hopeless, but still.
last I checked disk cache was still memory.
I do
having not taught calculus in GCSE means they can't use it in any A levels except A level maths because you may be doing them without doing A level maths and even if you do A level maths you don't do any calculus beyond the trivial polynomial stuff until the second year.
I still don't fully grasp why the different differntiation/integration formula work (I did A level further maths but while doing it realised that maths wasn't really my thing and went to do an electronic systems engineering degree) but I know what differentiation means and what the most important rules are. I have found that understanding electronics in terms of calculus makes so much more sense than understanding it in terms of complicated resultant formula. I got a B in A level electronics but I never really felt comfortable with inductors and capacitors until one of my university lecturers gave the underlying differntial equations (V=L(dI/dT) and I=C(dV/dT) ).
I never did physics A level but I would imagine it suffers the same problem.
P.S. if you are doing A level maths and want to make some questions easier learn about the complex exponential, it's not on the sylabus but it greatly simplifies some of the integration problems they throw at you.
that is possible but the thing is while apple doesn't want the iphone to be able to be used with anyone other than AT&T as it's home network they do want it to be able to roam. From what I have heared on /. roaming seems particularlly important in the USA where afaict people travel a lot between different companies areas.
Also I suspect this exclusive deal with AT&T is not a permanent thing and sooner or later they will want to sell unlocked iphones arround the world.
Honestly only an idiot would buy a MacBook and run Windows instead of OS X
My macboot triple boots OS-X, windows and linux and mostly runs linux. It cost me just under £1K total including a copy of whitebox OEM windows XP pro and replacing the ram and hard drive to bring them up to 2GB and 200GB respectively (though I did get the macbook itself at student discount price). I don't consider that excessive for a well built laptop. If I need to test something on OS-X the option is there without having to crack anything. Apple provide all the drivers for OS-X as part of the installer and all the drivers for windows as a single CD image containing an installer that installs everything required.
it's hard to compare like for like with laptops but comparing the macbook to the dell lattidue (the inspiron line is cheap shit afaict) the prices look pretty similar to me (I just took the basic model lattidude and the basic model macbook and configured them to have as similar specs as possible and ended up with £637 for the macbook and £688 for the lattidue both ex VAT) so if you decide you don't want OS-X then all you've wasted is the cost of a windows license rather than the cost of a complete laptop. For those who plan to pirate windows (or use a corporate upgrade/downgrade license without having anything to upgrade from which is technically against the rules but happens all the time) the deal looks even better.
I love it when Europeans say, "no our phones are unlocked." Bullshit!
He didn't say that, he said that contract phones were generally supplied unlocked while pay as you go ones were normally locked. That has generally been my experiance too though I have seen exceptions both ways (both phones sold as pay as you go that weren't locked and phones sold on contract that were).
My gf bought a cool Meteor Nokia phone in Ireland to get it unlocked to use on T-Mobile in the US. Bad idea... After the guy who sells phone accessories in the cart in the middle of the mall screwed up the unlock code 3x, the phone was dead. She then had to mail it to the UK to some guy who reflashes them. Vodafone-IRL phones are just as locked...
I presume the phone your girlfriend bought in ireland was a pay as you go one and it's sad that she ran into a vendor who wasn't very competant but thats what you get for using shady market stalls. Out of interest how much did it cost her to post it to the UK and get it reflashed?
Unlocking is huge over here in the uk and not all the places that do it are short lived market stalls. There is a shop near me that does it which is in a very visible location and has been arround for years. They sell new and secondhand phones too. For new phones they sell contracts, pay as you go and sim free with no network lock. Secondhand phones they seem to always sell sim free and unlocked (the one I bought from them was orange branded but unlocked). While I don't know what method they use for sure I stronly suspect they have the flashing equipment at least as a backup method.
Last I checked SMT test kit was damn expensive.
however a bigger problem is that afaict the chip in question had it's pins on the bottom so they had to connect to a track. Clipping to a tiny pin is possible with the right clips but I don't see how clipping to a track is.
unless you are multi-homed on high grade connections your internet connection is the most likely point of failure for your external email traffic anyway so moving to an internet hosted mail service isn't liable to reduce the reliability much if at all.
outsourcing e-mail archival or internal e-mail on the other hand seems like a pretty bad idea to me.
You're much better off with a unixy OS in any environment where gaming isn't important.
strike out "gaming isn't" and replace it with "windows applications aren't"
Most people seem to have a windows app that they are closely tied to be it access, outlook, visual studio, photoshop, some internal buisness app or whatever.
Sure you can run some windows apps under wine tolerablly if you understand how wine maps between the unixy filesystem and windows drive letters and your particular app doesn't hit too many wine bugs but generally it is pretty painfull. The cost of windows licenses (even if you end up buying both OEM base licenses and corp upgrade/downgrade licenses) isn't that high and any required locking down can be handled by either scripting or imaging.
ahh the horrible practice of hiding your applications startup time in the systems startup time. It is practices like that which make low end machines horrible to use and contribute to the feeling of bloat in a modern desktop OS.
many government departments and even entire governments arround the world are threatening to require arhived documents to be in standard formats. MS is trying to do an end run arround theese requirements by getting standards bodies to approve a fake standard they have written. Unfortunately it seems that they are having quite some sucess in doing so thanks to thier use of various dirty tactics.
Nothing is stopping a third party from writing their own JRE from scratch. Many corporations have done this already.
I am not aware of anyone that has sucessfully written a full J2SE JRE from scratch. IBMs java versions are licensed dirivitives of suns and the attempts by apache and gnu are far from complete. Some public classes in java have virtually no documentation at all (look at javax.swing.plaf.* for an example) so you would have needed to have a seperate reverse engineering and reimplementation team or risk cross contamination.
of course if you only care about one of the limited java subsets like J2ME then things are much easier.
The sun code is mostly released under a free software license (GPL with linking exception) now though, just a few holes left to be plugged and build issues to be sorted out and java will finally be FOSS after all theese years. Hopefully it will then see wide porting.
Speaking of which, I was at Best Buy the other day... just to amuse myself I asked the clerk if it was possible to get one of the computers there with XP. "No." Ok, how about with no OS at all? "No. Not possible." Even mail order? "Even mail order."
out of interest did they offer it with a version that offers downgrade rights to XP pro (that is buisness or ultimate)?
I read somewhere that SC2 will be Dx10 only (and Mac)!- talk about decision time for some people - upgrade a rig because your forced to (because of MS) or buy a Mac.. guess we'll have to see which route people go... interesting though
I suspect most gamers will upgrade to vista (or dual boot XP and vista) if they aren't on it already by the time a DX10 only game they want comes out.
Apples desktop range does not impress me. When buying a machine for gaming I want a machine without integrated monitor (generally I want to have more than one machine at a location but the location only has one decent monitor spot) and with proper 3D graphics (obviously nessacery for a gaming rig). Apples cheapest machine that fits this spec would cost £1500 here in the UK (full price inc VAT direct from apple, special offers from resellers and student discount may reduce this but I can't easilly get at the student discount shop right now). Worse that machine comes with a stingy 250GB hdd and only a gig of ram (and mac pro memory is FB-dimms with special extra heatsinking so it's over twice the price of normal DDR2 ram).
P.S. I have a macbook (which runs linux most of the time but also has OS-X and XP installed) which I spent just under £1000 total on (including XP pro OEM and replacement parts I bought because they were cheaper than apples upgrade options) paying student discount price and it's a pretty nice machine though not without it's quirks.
EPIC and ID (who at least for the FPS market seem to be the big engine guys) have had linux support for ages but few third party titles based on those engines bother presumablly because they consider it extra work for little gain.
what would you say makes a botnet inherently insecure? The bot can patch the exploits it used to get in and can be made to only take and relay commands if they are cryptographically signed by the bonets owner. That way taking over one machine from the botnet doesn't really get you any further towards compromising the net as a whole.
I have two relatives wanting XP and trying to drag me down the Vista hole.
You could just buy machines with vista buisness and excercise your downgrade rights to use XP pro on them for the time being.
In London most cab companies add a 12.5% surcharge if you pay by credit card.
IIRC the EU decided to force the credit card companies to allow surcharges. I don't belive the US has had the balls to do the same.
This is why there are system calls like getpwuid and getpwnam, to convert between UIDs and usernames independently of the underlying authentication system.
I'm pretty sure those are library functions not system calls so all strace will see is the application accessing the authentication system.
surely since ebay is US based they could just order ebay to order skype to put in tracking facilities for them.